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Nestor Makhno
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno or 'Bat'ko '(1889 - 1934) was an anarcho-communist revolutionary, commander of the Black Army (and considered a military genius) during the Russian Civil War (which defended the Free Territory of Ukraine) and one of the ideological founders of Platformism. Born Childhood Born to a poor peasant family in Gulyai-Polye, Ukraine to a family of six boys, his father died before he turned a year old. He began working tending cows and sheep for the local peasantry, later working as a farm laborer and in a factory. Imprisonment In 1906, a year after the failed Russian Revolution, he joined an anarchist group in Gulyai-Polye at age 17, and was arrested and imprisoned to years later for involvement around the murder of a police officer. He was originally sentenced to death, but was instead changed to life in prison in Butyrki prison in Moscow because of his youth. He hated life in prison and was unable to accept the strict discipline, leading to him frequently being placed in solidarity confinement and tortured. But he shared a prison cell with the older anarchist Peter Arshinov who taught him about Bakunin and Kropotkin. He was released from prison in 1917, as the February Revolution gave amnesty to political prisoners. Return He returned to his native village and helped organize a trade union for farm laborers. He was also elected chairman of the local union of carpenters and metalworkers and the Gulyai-Polye Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies. In August 1917, he recruited several armed peasants and began forcefully expropriating land from the wealthy in the area and redistributing it to the peasantry, making him a hero, compared to Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev. The signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (ceding much of Ukraine to the German and Austrian empires) led to him going into hiding as soldiers began to occupy towns, and he escaped to Moscow, arriving in June 1918. He arranged a meeting with Peter Kropotkin and later one at the Kremlin with Vladimir Lenin, where he argued that anarchists were a realistic and effective group, and Lenin helped offer him to return to Ukraine. Black Army Nestor returned to Gulyai-Polye in July 1918, and the area was occupied by Austrian troops and by the militia of their Ukrainian puppet, Hetman Skoropadsky. Organising the Black Army, Makhno launched a series of raids against the Austrians and Hetmanites and against the manors of the nobility. He used tachnakas and horses in several battles between the Dnieper river and the Sea of Azov, attracting independent bands of guerillas, villagers and anarchists. He became incredibly popular among peasants, often freely providing his army with fresh food and horses, allowing them to travel up to 80 kilometers a day with little difficulty. The Black Army would launch successful hit-and-run attacks on noble manors and military garrisons and quickly disappear into the steppes. They often stole uniforms of the enemy army and disguised themselves as such to spy and perform quick sneak attacks. If cornered, they would bury their weapons, walk to a nearby village and work in the fields, resembling ordinary peasants. Several defeats of Austrian and German soldiers and his humour led to the nickname "Bat'ko" (little father) by his soldiers. The Austrians and Germans left Ukraine as World War I came to an end, leading to the Black Army using their abandoned guns, tools, food, clothing and vehicles for themselves. He took the city of Ekaterinoslav by hiding himself and his troops on a train in ordinary clothing and attacking nationalists in the city by surprise. But had to flee across the Dnieper river to Gulyai-Polye after reinforcements came. He oversaw many congresses of village assemblies and workers' councils in Gulyai-Polye and formed an alliance with the Bolsheviks, who worked together to destroy much of the White Army in Ukraine. Tensions with the Bolsheviks Such gestures, however, could not conceal the underlying hostility between the two groups. The Communists had little taste for the autonomous status of the Insurgent Army or for the powerful attraction it exerted on their own peasant recruits. The Makhnovists, on their side, feared that sooner or later the Red Army would attempt to bring their movement to heel. As friction increased, the Soviet newspapers abandoned their eulogies of the Makhnovists and began to attack them as "bandits." In April 1919 the Third Regional Congress of Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents met in defiance of a ban placed on it by the Soviet authorities. In May two Cheka agents sent to assassinate Makhno were caught and executed. The final breach occurred when the Makhnovists called a Fourth Regional Congress for June 15 and invited the soldiers of the Red Army to send representatives. Trotsky, commander in chief of the Bolshevik forces, was furious. On June 4 he banned the congress and outlawed Makhno. Communist troops carried out a lightning raid on Gulyai-Polye and dissolved the agricultural communes set up by the Makhnovists. A few days later. Denikin's forces arrived and completed the job, liquidating the local Soviets as well. The shaky alliance was hastily resumed that summer, when Denikin's drive towards Moscow sent both the Communists and the Makhnovists reeling. During August and September Makhno's guerrillas were pushed back towards the western borders of the Ukraine. On September 26, however, Makhno launched a successful counterattack at the village of Peregonovka, near Uman, cutting the White general's supply lines and creating panic and disorder in his rear. This was Denikin's first serious reverse in his advance into the Russian heartland and an important factor in halting his drive towards the Bolshevik capital. By the end of the year, a counteroffensive by the Red Army had forced Denikin to beat a retreat to the shores of the Black Sea. At the end of 1919, Makhno received instructions from the Red 116 command to transfer his troops to the Polish front. The order was plainly designed to draw the Insurgent Army away from its home territory, leaving it open to the establishment of Bolshevik rule. Makhno refused to budge. Trotsky, he said, wanted to replace Denikin's forces with the Red Army and the dispossessed landlords with political commissars. Having vowed to cleanse Russia of anarchism "with an iron broom,"4 Trotsky replied by again outlawing the Makhnovists. There ensued eight months of bitter struggle, with losses heavy on both sides. A severe typhus epidemic augmented the toll of victims. Badly outnumbered, Makhno's partisans avoided pitched battles and relied on the guerrilla tactics they had perfected in more than two years of civil war. Hostilities were broken off in October 1920, when Baron Wrangel, Denikin's successor in the south, launched a major offensive, striking northwards from the Crimea. Once more the Red Army enlisted Makhno's aid, in return for which the Communists agreed to an amnesty for all anarchists in Russian prisons and guaranteed the anarchists freedom of propaganda on condition that they refrain from calling for the overthrow of the Soviet government. Barely a month later, however, the Red Army had made sufficient gains to ensure victory in the Civil War, and the Soviet leaders tore up their agreement with Makhno. Not only had the Makhnovists outlived their usefulness as a military partner, but as long as the bat'ko was at large the spirit of anarchism and the danger of a peasant rising would remain to haunt the Bolshevik regime. On November 25, 1920, Makhno's commanders in the Crimea, fresh from their victory over Wrangel, were seized by the Red Army and shot. The next day, Trotsky ordered an attack on Makhno's headquarters in Gulyai-Polye, during which Makhno's staff were captured and imprisoned or shot on the spot. The bat'ko himself, however, together with a remnant of an army that had once numbered in the tens of thousands, managed to elude his pursuers. After wandering over the Ukraine for the better part of a year, the guerrilla leader, exhausted and suffering from unhealed wounds, crossed the Dniester River into Rumania and eventually found his way to Paris. Finally, the last years of Makhno's life deserve fuller treatment than they have received from historians. Of all the writers to date, Malcolm Menzies and Alexandre Skirda have provided the most satisfactory accounts of this period.22 Yet even they have not told the full and dramatic story of Makhno's escape across the Dniester, his internment in Rumania, his escape to Poland, his arrest, trial, and acquittal, his flight to Danzig, renewed imprisonment and final escape (aided by Berkman 124 and other comrades in Europe),23 and his ultimate sanctuary in Paris, where he lived his remaining years in obscurity, poverty, and disease, an Antaeus cut off from the soil that might have replenished his strength. According to Berkman, Makhno in Paris dreamed of returning to his native land and "taking up again the struggle for liberty and social justice."24 He had always hated the "poison" of big cities, cherishing the natural environment in which he was born. How ironic that he should have ended his days in a great foreign capital, working in an automobile factory, a restless consumptive for whom drink provided meager relief. Yet he never lost his passion for anarchism, never abandoned the movement to which he had dedicated his life. He attended anarchist meetings (frequenting, among others, the Jewish Autodidact Club), defended the Organizational Platform of his old comrade Arshinov, and mingled with anarchists from all over the world, including a group of Chinese students and also Durruti and Ascaso from Spain, whom he regaled with his adventures in the Ukraine and offered his help when the moment for their own struggle should arrive. Though death intervened to prevent this, it is of interest that a number of veterans of his Insurgent Army did in fact go to fight in the Durruti column in 1936.25 How fitting, then, that the Spanish comrades should have provided financial assistance when Makhno lay mortally ill with tuberculosis. Death Nestor died as a result of complications from tuberculosis at age 45. His body was cremated, the ashes buried in the Pere-La-chaise cemetery in Paris, near the mass grave of the Communards who were murdered in the Bloody Week.Category:Libertarian Socialist Wiki Category:Libertarian Socialism Category:Libertarian Socialists Category:Anarchists Category:Anarchism Category:Anarcho-Communism Category:Anarcho-Communists Category:Ukraine Category:Black Army (Ukraine)